Experimental Tuesdays: New Red Order – Never Settle

This promotional initiation video lures inductees with promises of decolonization and settler remediation. Imagery of settler-led planetary destruction is juxtaposed with sequences of underground group therapy sessions where settlers can lose, forget, and explore their identities in order to indigenize. Sharing their labor, lurking through museums, and institutions, future accomplices snap thousands of cellphone pictures of every artifact and artwork on hand.

Deploying and containing confrontational representations around the stakes of accompliceship, the video examines the dynamics influencing the conditions in which the concerns of indigenous people are often treated as a topic du jour and then co-opted by non-indigenous people, alongside the search for ways to make amends. 

New Red Order is a public secret society facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil, Zack Khalil, and Jackson Polys. In our current period of existential and environmental catastrophe, desires for Indigenous epistemologies increase and enterprising settlers labor to extract this understanding as if it were a natural resource. New Red Order—emerging out of contradistinction from the Improved Order of Red Men, a secret society that ‘plays Indian’—calls attraction toward indigeneity into question, yet promotes this desire, and enjoins potential non-Indigenous accomplices to participate in the co-examination and expansion of Indigenous agency. Working with an interdisciplinary network of informants the NRO co-produces video, performance, and installation works that confront settler colonial tendencies and obstacles to Indigenous growth. They have presented their work at Artists Space, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Lincoln Center, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, New York Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Toronto Biennial 2019, Walker Art Center, and Whitney Biennial 2019, among others, expanding the public secret society network across numerous institutional platforms. 

Members of NRO will join via Zoom for a public Q&A after the screening.

2018 | 50 minutes | United States / Canada | English | Color | Stereo | 16:9 | HD video